judo

When you see a pattern in the way your student receives penalties or shido’s it can often be associated a few different larger issues with your student. Being able to find the patterns is very important as well as finding the deeper reasoning behind these penalties.

For instance, if your student is regularly receiving penalties for passivity or defensive posture, it can often be a sign he/she is getting out-gripped and needs to improve upon their kumikata strategies. Another issue could be penalties late in matches for false attacks or passivity, may be a sign that your athlete requires better conditioning. Studying penalties is often a forgotten detail in the analysis of your judoka, but it could turn out to be of incredible importance.

Here are some things to look for when studying the penalties received by your students.

Are the penalties against lefties or righties? I know this may seem obvious to some but, competing against lefties or righties can really mess with your athlete’s ability to perform especially if they are not properly prepared for it. If your athlete has difficulty adjusting to the difference in gripping someone of the opposite side, bailing out of the exchange may be their only way to avoid being thrown and a shido is a better result than being thrown for ippon.

At what point in the match do they happen most often? Throughout the match? At the beginning? Near the end? The timing of the penalties can tell you a lot. If it is at the beginning of the match, it often points to your athlete not being focused, maybe they do not have a good warm up routine. If the penalties are occurring throughout the match this could mean that they are having issues with strategy of how to fight the opponent.

Finally and most obviouslywhat are the warnings for? Passivity, false attacks or stepping outside of the tatami?

Knowing objectively why an athlete is receiving these penalties can have the affect of the canary in the coal mine. Addressing the particular issue can often lead to great immediate benefits.

Scouting your opposition

Knowing what your judo opponent wants to do has obvious as well as huge benefits. This type of video analysis requires you to have access to your opponent’s matches on video. When the two judoka have a history you can very quickly pull up all matches that have occurred on Athlete Analyzer Judo (or if someone else of your students that use AAJ have met the opponent before). If not, you can watch matches that are available from the judobase.org or judoinside.com if your opponent competes internationally, or on any other Youtube channel available.

It is very important to know if your opponent is right or left handed. As well all matches that you watch should be against athletes that are the same side as your opponent. If the matches you watch of your opponent are against left handed fighters and your students is a right-handed fighter then you are not going to have a lot of relevant information to go on.

PATTERN: a discernible regularity in the world or in a manmade design. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner.

What is your opponent’s favorite technique? Not only do we want to know which throw they use the most and are the most successful with. But also, the important details that precede the attack. The grip that your opponent attacks from. Which grip his opponent has when he attacks, and what type of movement does he force his opponent to make before attempt his technique.

Every athlete has tendencies. Finding those to prevent against their strongest attack as well recognizing opportunities to use your best techniques can quite easily be the different between winning and losing a match. Once the tendencies are found you want to create a game plan to either prevent their actions, or counter them.

Finally and maybe most importantly you have to drill the game plan in the dojo. Have another student assist, the closer their behavior matches that of the opponent the better. It will be very difficult for an athlete to perform the game plan in a tournament if they only talked about it in the dojo. The game plan must be drilled.

I have found this has helped my students not only against the specific athlete we are preparing for but in all athletes that fight in a similar manner.

As athletes fight in specific patterns, like minded athletes do as well.

Book a personal demonstration of Athlete Analyzer Judo

If you would like to have a personal one to one demonstration of AAJ just click on one of the links below and pick a time slot.

Correcting errors made in competition

Previously, we looked at reinforcing previously applied skills. For part 2 we are going to look at correcting errors made in competition. This method is one that you have to be a little more careful with, as too many examples of your athlete making a mistake is likely to harm their confidence.

Remember: We don’t want to get too hung up on what they did wrong: we want to focus on what to do right going forward.

Once the problem has been pointed out, the next thing to do is to find the solution, and then train that solution repeatedly. You don’t break habits by just looking at the problem, but rather, by creating a new habit through practice.

Tip: Create a new coaching habit for yourself

Another practice that I have found helpful is to book a period of time every week to review a couple of your athletes’ matches. This weekly coaching habit keeps you in the practice of reviewing matches, and there are always little details you can find to improve upon. Allowing some time to go by after a tournament will take all emotion out of your review process, allowing you to be more objective, and thus do a better job.

As you review more matches by more of your athletes, you may even find patterns of mistakes made by your athletes. The necessary corrections can then be implemented on a large scale.

Reflect on this: Reviewing your athletes is in fact a form of self-assessment. Keep on top of your own coaching skills as part of your regular weekly routine.

Book a personal demonstration

If you would like to have a personal one to one demonstration of AAJ just click on one of the links below and pick a time slot.

The importance of video analysis and three ways to perform it

It is has become clear that video review (or video analysis) is an integral part of developing athletes across sports. To register and analyze sportdata is crucial to develop today’s athletes. The problem is that it is relatively new to judo, especially at the younger development level. Sportdata for judo is finally gaining greater interest even in younger levels and is now here to stay.

Learning how to perform this process correctly can lead to huge benefits for your judoka. As a general rule there are three practical ways to utilize video review, or some combination of the three.

In all three cases you want to create multiple small clips (or a single short clip) of the the action that you are targeting. You don’t want to sit down with your athlete watching full matches all day waiting for the perfect moments. This means that video review days require a little pre-production and game plan of what you want your athlete to see. The idea being that watching hours of matches, is for one thing an inefficient use of time, but also there is so much information in a match that they may lose context of what the specific skill or action you want them to take. Short clip(s) keep them engaged in the process and focused on the immediate task at hand.

Positive reinforcement

My favoured of the two methods for video review on my own student is in reinforcing a previously applied skill. I believe that positive reinforcement is our most powerful tool as a coach. It builds your student up by showing them something they have done successfully before, which clearly means that they are capable of performing this action again. It builds your athletes confidence which is essential in high performance.

Humans are also incredibly good at mimicking, it is how we learn all of our skills as a baby. To watch something and imitate it is an innate and incredibly powerful way for us to learn. Showing athletes what they are not only capable of, but what they have achieved, can be a great motivator towards future success.

Book a personal demonstration

If you would like to have a personal one to one demonstration of AAJ just click on one of the links below and pick a time slot.

That’s a question that we get quite often when we’re meeting interested coaches and athletes. Often, we end up in quite interesting discussions. Some of our visitors think that Athlete Analyzer Judo is for the very top elite level judokas and their coaches. That’s not the case and during our conversations, they often change their minds and think quite different.

We recommend that judokas start using Athlete Analyzer Judo from 13-14 years and up. In this age, the judoka starts to reflect more about his or her judo and is quite often also changing their judo accordingly to their body growth. Athlete Analyzer Judo makes it easy to highlight both their strengths and weaknesses and that is a strong motivational factor for further training. It’s also easy to spot unwanted patterns like picking up unnecessary shidos during contests. So, it’s a good thing starting as pre-cadet to form a baseline for future training and analysis. But, this is of course quite depending on the ambition level of the judoka.

As the judoka mowing up through cadet and junior level the system makes it easier to get new insights. Some techniques that worked well earlier gets a lower efficiency, new techniques prove to work more efficiently during contests. They also increase their complimentary training making the training plans more complex than before. In this age, they are also more likely to have more coaches around them then before. Maybe they enter a regional team or hopefully even the national team. If the judoka has used AAJ since before the new coaches will have a veritable goldmine of information and can very quickly help the judoka towards their next level.

What about the coaches? Well, AAJ makes collaboration between coaches easier as they can help each other. One coach can plan judo sessions, another coach can plan the strength training and another the cardio within the club. All in one place and easily shared with the judokas. It’s also possible to collaborate between different levels. For instance, a cadet national coach will of course share the training plan to the national cadet team but the coach he can also share the same plan to club coaches. The club coaches can easily adjust the plan accordingly to suit the club and then share it to all cadets in the club. In this way, it’s easy to spread “best practice” among clubs in a country. It’s not always necessary to invent the wheel over and over again.

One thing we all agree on – you never stop learning judo, whatever your current level. There’s always something that can be improved even further and Athlete Analyzer Judo makes it a lot easier as it let the coaches support all their judokas a lot more, in less time.

To analyze your judo you’ll of course need some data to analyze. All analysis charts displays data from tagged match events from your uploaded match videos so there’s no way around to upload your videos. Over time your tagged match events will provide a great resource in order to analyze your judo in various ways.

Upload your judo videos

The easiest way to get your match videos to our server is to let a friend record your matches from your smartphone and then upload the videos using the app. Just beware that your videos can be large so make sure to use a wifi connection if you don’t have a lot of mobile data. You can also of course upload your judo matches from a computer if you prefer that. Just make sure your computer don’t enter energy save during the upload process as it might interrupt the upload.

Video size

Sometimes your friends will continue to record the match after soremade which often is quite unnecessary, at least for analyzing purposes. In order to keep down the size of your videos there’s a lot of time saving to gain if you just end the recording after soremade. Another tip is to win your matches quick which will result in small and neat video sizes 😉

Some users pause the recording during mate to save video size. This is not recommended because we’ll soon add new charts for analyzing the time during your active and passive periods in your matches. Sometimes if there’s a long break due to injury or the referees having a long discussion or something else you might have to pause but otherwise, keep recording.

You can also experiment which resolution you record your videos in. A high resolution will of course result in a large video size. We recommend that you use 720p resolution which is sufficient in most cases.

Collaboration between coaches and athletes on different levels like national, regional and clubs can be really complex and time consuming. There are many aspects to consider like training plans, technical and tactical improvements but also competition planning and a lot of other things. All information have to be distributed between the levels to make it possible to collaborate.

Even just in a club with several coaches this could a hurdle and take away the some of the focus from what actually matters – the athletes.

Most organisations on different levels have created different administrative routines to manage their work. Often with office software like Word or Excel distributed via home pages or email. Many organisations have one system for reporting training, another system for match analysis and different routines for setting goals and do follow ups regarding technical and tactical aspects of their athletes. Each organisation has created it’s own solution and it’s hard to get an optimized information flow that simplifies collaboration between different levels.

Most of you will probably recognize the situation illustrated in the picture above. It’s difficult and time consuming to gather all needed information and even more harder to analyze it efficiently. In fact, that’s why we decided to create Athlete Analyzer – a complete judo software to keep everything needed in one place and enhance collaboration.

Training plans & diaries: The coaches create training plans and the athletes reports each workout. If the athletes uses the app they can report their training as done with one click. That’s quite straight forward and forms the base for the training plans and diaries.Coaches can also collaborate while creating plans. One coach can update judo sessions and another coach can update the strength and conditioning sessions. They can also add other events like camps or competitions in the same plan. Every update in the plan will instantly update all athletes calendars. Another collaboration feature is that for example a national coach can share a basic plan like “Build up period Cadets” to club coaches. The club coaches can then share that plan to all their cadets in the club. This saves a lot of time and also spread “Best practices” from national level down to club level.

Match videos: One decision we made early on was to let the athletes analyze and tag their contests by themselves. There are several reasons for this. The athletes need to watch their contests and reflect on what happened. It makes the athletes more engaged and makes it also a lot easier to discuss the situations and the outcome with their coaches. And to be honest, a coach with let’s say ten athletes saves a lot of time if the athletes tag their own contests. All coaches connected to the athlete can then easily analyze the contests and provide valuable feedback. All feedback are displayed below each video in a thread format making it easy to read the other coaches’ feedback.

Development plans & Goals: Coaches and the athletes themselves can set goals for basically every aspect in the system, for example “More Harai goshi from right neck grip”. The system keep track of all tags done by the athlete from the videos and when the goal is met all coaches gets an notification automatically. It also makes it very clear for all coaches around the athlete what they should focus on during future training sessions.

We have made a short video explaining how Athlete Analyzer works. Don’t forget to turn up the volume and please share it among your judo friends.

We have recently released “Structured goals” in Athlete Analyzer enabling coaches and athletes to set goals based on their analysis from training and competitions. Having clear goals are highly motivating and also help coaches to collaborate for the benefit for their athletes.

With Athlete Analyzer it’s very easy to analyze an athlete’s scoring in Nage Waza and see their patterns regarding every aspect like throwing directions, kumi kata and much more. The data comes from the tagging of match events in the match videos done by the athletes.

It’s possible to create goals on every aspect regarding scoring in Nage Waza but in this example we can see that the athlete lacks throws at the direction North West and want to set a new goal for increase throws in that direction

We create a fairly straightforward goal of more (3 during the period) Osoto gari at North West using a right neck grip:

The judoka will now have this new goal:

All coaches with a relation with the athlete can see the goal and can focus the technical training for the athlete on Osoto gari in the dojo.

When the athlete has managed to throw with Osoto gari at North East in a competition the goal starts to be fulfilled:

When the athlete reach the goal the athlete will receive a badge and all coaches around the athlete will get a notification. This makes it very easy to collaborate between the athlete and all his/her coaches.

“Structured goals” in Athlete Analyzer gives you the possibility to set very detailed complex goals regarding Nage Waza, Ne Waza, Competition results, training and other more general goals.

As coaches we set goals for our judoka, either instinctively or consciously.

”try to use your ashiwaza in this next randori.”

”first person to score can stay out.”

”you must attack first.”

All coaches will be able to reflect on their own use of such motivational statements, which are actually setting task goals or ego goals for the judoka. Working with more experienced judoka, we often work with them to encourage them to set their own goals for the randori or contest, or competition.

This approach is supported by researchers, for example, Ziv and Lidor in 2013, and Gernigon and colleagues in 2004.

Until now, the available ways that coaches have to measure, record goals and their achievement has been very limited. In the modern world there are plenty of software solutions aimed at supporting the coach, but the unique nature of judo means that technical goals are ignored by most of the options.

Athlete Analyzer Judo, is designed by judo coaches for judo coaches, and provides coaching tools specific to our crazy sport. Like all good coaches, Nicklas and his team are constantly developing, innovating and experimenting with new approaches. The latest innovation, ”Structured Goals”, takes this software onto another level.

”Structured Goals” builds on what the literature tells us about psychology of judoka, and sports performers, and puts it into a judo-specific format that can be used to deliver ”Evidence Based Coaching”. It allows you to measure the effectiveness of your goal setting and impact on the motivation of judoka.